Seasonal Insanity Is Back

EditorialThe Hartford Courant

Face it, the people who have the real fun during March Madness are the college kids who pile into a substandard car, sleep on a friend's floor, paint their faces and scream their heads off for their teams. When their team responds as the UConn Huskies did Thursday night, with a valiant overtime win over St. Joseph's, the students are at heaven's door.

The annual spring hoopfest is a ball for the fans in the stands, but also for the 60 million grown-ups who take very brief hiatuses from work to fill out NCAA tournament brackets, the ultimate office pool.

March was not always mad. When Holy Cross won the championship in 1947 behind the great Bob Cousy, there were only eight teams in the field. One of the most exciting upsets, Chicago Loyola's overtime defeat of two-time defending champion Cincinnati in 1963, wasn't on national television.

There wasn't much interest in picking the winner from that point to the mid-1970s because UCLA won it all the time. But after UCLA coach John Wooden retired in 1975, things began to change, according to Smithsonian.com. The tournament expanded to 32 teams that year. The first NCAA bracket pool is believed to have started in a Staten Island bar in 1977.

The watershed moment was the 1979 championship game between Magic Johnson's Michigan State team and Larry Byrd's Indiana State quintet. It created a national excitement that has only grown bigger. The adoption of the NCAA women's tournament in 1982 and the expansion of the men's tourney to 64 teams in 1985 solidified March Madness as a national passion.

Of course it's good to see the UConn men back in the tournament, after a year's absence due to inexcusable academic lapses several years ago. Isn't it more fun with the Huskies? Let us hope the walkway to the library remains well-marked.

We also wish the UConn women well. OK, they are like the old UCLA dynasty, but a UConn-Notre Dame final — between two unbeaten teams — might be to the women's game what the Magic-Bird matchup was to the men's.